


Physic

by thedevilchicken



Category: Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-22
Updated: 2016-12-22
Packaged: 2018-09-11 04:29:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8953690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases. - Hippocrates





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cienna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cienna/gifts).



Jack Aubrey is not a man of cities. 

Stephen met him in a town some years ago, though Mahon at the time could have hardly been held up as the most singular example of Jack Aubrey's behaviour off the sea when the settlement had been, at the time, so thoroughly the Navy's. Stephen recalls that a fellow could scarce turn but he ran across a drunken seaman here, a straight-backed lieutenant with a fresh commission there, or else a midshipman in his cups with a dockside trollop in his purse. The whole town's industry had bent itself most assiduously to the demands and the desires of His Majesty's Navy, though Stephen knows it swayed to French command with great enough aplomb after the signing at Amiens. He was there in Mahon after the treaty, though he found French hospitality to lack somewhat. Of anyone, he should know what the town was then. 

Jack's home in Mahon had been a room hired at the Crown, the inn that had not quite jokingly been named for another back across the seas in Portsmouth that bore a great gilt sign to match. Their arrival in Portsmouth, however, had led simply to a further illustration of Jack's behaviour in a Navy town and no great illumination of his character; it was perhaps apparent to a lesser degree than Stephen had observed within the port at Mahon, though the preponderance of seaman there - both merchant and naval - swaying from liquor in the city's streets made it quite impossible that Stephen's mind did not sketch out the parallel. Jack strode about the town as if he fairly owned it; in a time that followed narrowly his ascension of the lists to post, Jack was assured of the world and of his own place within it. By Jack's side, at that time, Stephen felt himself in the most disconcerting fashion almost doubly assured of his own.

But then: London. The Admiralty called and so Captain Aubrey was with all haste obliged to answer, and when the carriage at last pulled in, when the two of them alighted from it, the change that their location brought about in Jack became most readily apparent. It seemed Jack believed that London presaged some nameless manner of catastrophe, that perhaps his career would there be curtailed as many had, that perhaps he would lose him every penny of his fortune and then more besides though his fortune then weren't so very deep. To Stephen, the dreary London streets seemed not so very different in their composition than those they had not long since walked in Portsmouth, but Jack moved as though he found them venomous beneath his feet instead of merely rain-swept. 

Stephen watched him. Stephen made a study of him, with all his naturalistic instincts brought to bear. In the streets there, about his business in civilian dress, Jack appeared perplexingly diminished; where at sea he would have walked his deck at any time and in most any weather, even through a storm of the most alarming proportions, his yellow hair sodden and whipped by the wind about his rather lively face, on land Jack huddled beneath his over-adequate umbrella's marquee-like spread of canvas like a man afraid that he may spoil the leather of his shoes with the most innocuous of rainwater should he but place a step awry. Where at sea he would have spread his maps and found their course with surety, on land he struggled desperately to find his bearings. At sea, Jack had the weather gage; on land, Stephen was the man most at his ease. 

The second evening after their arrival, Stephen noted to himself the tepid manner in which Jack received their inn's pretty chambermaids, two young women who served them a hearty meal in Jack's hired room. As they ate - Jack's appetite, it seemed, could not be dulled even were he so clearly out of spirits - Stephen recalled their time in Mahon. He recalled Mercedes - Mercy, they'd called her - and the fancy Jack had taken to her. She had been pretty, though not nearly so much prettier than their present company as to warrant Jack's very near complete lack of attentions. Perhaps, Stephen thought, the fact of it was quite simply that Jack's remove from the sea practiced upon his character somewhat, though he had to own he'd seen him act the country gent with a good deal more alacrity than he'd taken to the part of man about town.

"Joy, you seem dreadfully out of sorts this evening," Stephen said, and speared a hunk of beef from out his stew that he then shook in Jack's direction in order that it punctuate his point. "Are you quite well?"

Jack smiled thinly at him across the laden tabletop. "I am quite well, Stephen," he replied, reaching for his glass. "I daresay it's just city life that don't agree with me, you know. We Navy men come in frightful set in our ways." 

Stephen supposed that was at least halfway the truth of it. For the present, he let the matter go.

They ate dinner in each other's company night on night for the coming week, with Stephen's curiosity quite piqued. They walked together in the mornings after breakfast, paid the requisite calls to Jack's old friends and his family acquaintances who were, Stephen surmised, often substantially put out he'd brought along his friend the small, dishevelled doctor with his pale, assessing eye. Jack, of course, had not the slightest notion of any fellow's lack of regard for his good friend and it is Stephen's fond belief he would have broken with them over it had he but made it plain to him; the belief of it, he found, was enough, and he did not need to act upon it.

They ate dinner night on night for the coming week, Stephen's eye upon Jack as they did so, until he thought at last he'd made him out. On sea, within the confines and the strictures of the Navy, Jack knew his place quite well; on land, amongst civilians, there were just too many options for him, too many routes and variations, choices, a lack of naval discipline such as the Articles of War he liked to read the men on Sundays. What was unthinkable shipboard became a good deal greyer in the city, murky waters that obscured arrays of rough, unnavigable shoals. Duty did not hold the same importance as there were precious few duties that must be performed. Desires were made treacherous as outcomes could not be so readily foretold. 

Bluff, boisterous Jack was stymied, constrained by such lack of constraint, preferring Stephen's company to all others who had crossed their path since they'd come to town and Stephen, for his part, found the notion quite endearing. But, when his exhortations to good cheer fell flat, when even evening interludes of music failed: Stephen thought, perhaps, he knew what he must do.

There is no powder nor tincture nor salt of which Stephen is aware that will calm a man's unsteady mind with any greater efficacy than attraction, and the consummation of it, where in such consummation there is found little risk of pox or other personal calamity. As such, Stephen set aside his own desires - they had been such for some years by then, albeit quietly - and set about the pointing out of their flirtatious chambermaids, of their widowed neighbour with her knowing smile, of any one of twenty healthy, robust women of their brief acquaintance with whom Jack could no doubt have found his misplaced certainty.

"Do you not find Elsie has a very comely smile?" Stephen asked, at breakfast. 

Jack, for his part, did not recall who Elsie was. The explanation of it - Jack could not grasp which girl was which, for all his trying - quite took the wind out of Stephen's sails.

"Do you not find Sally has a very shapely leg?" Stephen asked, at lunch.

Jack, for his part, said a great deal more of his own leg then than he did of poor Sally's, and of his great requirement of new silk stockings just in case they should be called upon to venture out one night for dinner. A friend of his father's was in town, he said, and any thought of the general was quite enough to trample upon Stephen's plans as well as Jack's.

"Do you not find Mrs Henderson to be quite a handsome sort of woman?" Stephen asked, at dinner. 

Jack, for his part, said he'd sailed with a Henderson once, a blockheaded lieutenant bought into the service with no greater nautical sense than had a barbary ape. Stephen was obliged to make the point that the creature Jack spoke of was in fact _macaca sylvanus_ , the barbary macaque, and after that a return to the topic of Mrs Henderson could not have been looked upon as favourable. 

"My dear, if you've a hankering for female company, I'm sure there's something could be done," Jack said, his look a comedy in misplaced discretion, as Stephen rose to leave the room for bed. Stephen raised his brows. "I don't mean to pry but it's just you've gone on so these past few hours, I thought..."

Stephen chuckled. "In the main, Jack, it's not myself I'm thinking of," he said, by way of explanation. 

"Me?"

"Naturally."

"You were thinking of my situation?"

"Of course. It was my intention to direct you toward agreeable alleviation it." 

Jack paused there by the still-closed door. He wiped off his palms on the fabric of his breeches, and then he frowned quite deeply. 

"What if I ain't so very concerned with alleviation?" he asked.

"Then I might ask why that is." 

"Ain't it obvious?" 

"Perhaps not as much as you might think."

"You've been watching me, Stephen."

"Yes, I have." 

Confusingly, Jack grinned at that. Confusingly, Jack pressed forward and pressed Stephen's back up to the door, one hand flush to the frame either side of Stephen's shoulders. Jack grinned, alight inside for the first time in days. When Jack kissed him on the mouth, still grinning and toothy, all Stephen said was, "Oh." Then his eyes went wide and round with surprise, and he said, " _Oh!_ " 

And, while Jack kissed him, while Jack fumbled to undress him, he understood his error: one cannot practice naturalism from a basis of assumptions. He, he was afraid, had made several.

Jack, as Stephen quickly came to know, practiced between the sheets as he did upon his violin: he gave it a good go, ever the enthusiastic amateur. Stephen explained to him the rudiments as they undressed and Jack's face turned red then redder still once he was devoid of shirt and breeches and stripped straight down to skin. A physician by trade, Stephen had seen many men - had seen Jack, in point of fact - in their altogether. Jack, a sailor, used as he was to the close quarters of a frigate's wardroom, must have seen likewise more than once - had caught Stephen more than once without his clothes out baking in the sun - but he stared despite it. Stephen understood. Their current state and situation was not to be tolerated while out at sea, and could be found out - even accidentally, perhaps especially so - quite readily aboard a Navy vessel. It was little wonder, Stephen thought, that Jack should shy away from it on land, and so it was little wonder he had sought to keep it secret. Stephen had not realised that the very act of observation would bring on so profound a change in the object he observed. Perhaps he would have done so sooner, had he, but that was quite another question.

"Don't be prudish, Jack," Stephen said, not quite as sternly has he'd meant it, and took Jack's cock into his hand. His fingers were stiff but it put across the generality of the idea. "Pray think of it as medicinal, should that assist."

Jack laughed and put his hands on him, anxious but wholehearted; he didn't look much like physicking was the thing what he required. And when Jack was inside him, red-faced and straining with all his yellow hair escaped its queue, with Stephen's glasses fallen to the floor and all their limbs ahoo, physicking was far from what it was. Jack's situation was nothing that wanted a cure at all, so Stephen came to realise, and their situation wanted only practice.

Jack Aubrey is not a man of cities. They make him awkward, they make of him a littler man, which is no appealing sight in any small particular when on deck he is himself so hugely and so freely. Sex has never been what Stephen could consider a full remedy to this, but that has not stopped their practice of it; Jack is himself again within it and then remains so after, just for the shortest while, and Stephen is amused to think he is the cause of that. At sea, Jack saves Stephen's life from drowning. On land, Stephen lends the surety that Jack finds sapped. 

They two have travelled the world since then, traversed it, run its lengths, made landfall on islands that few men have ever seen before, strolled through villages and towns and cities where they do not speak the language, though Stephen strives to learn. They have done so side by side, as friends and more. 

Jack is not a man of cities, but Stephen is. And between the two them, Stephen feels that they are quite complete.


End file.
